New Orleans jazz

Jelly on a roll

A re-release of a pre-war jazz recording is flying off the shelves

IN 1938, a casual encounter in Washington, DC, inspired one of the most remarkable documents in American music and culture. Alan Lomax, the young director of the American Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, heard that Jelly Roll Morton, a legendary pianist-composer from the bygone days of New Orleans jazz, was languishing in a seedy local club. Renowned as much for his bravado as his talent (his very nickname was a shameless sexual boast), Morton bitterly resented being cast aside by the flashy big bands of the swing era and was keen to stake his rightful claim to recognition.

Though Lomax actually disliked jazz, considering it a corruption of folk-music purity, he invited Morton to the Library of Congress to record some of his New Orleans memories. The moment the veteran pianist began to talk, play and sing, Lomax realised he had struck gold. That one-off interview stretched into months, producing a unique portrait of a fabulous time and place, mesmerisingly evoked by a Creole genius.

Despite their value and status among connoisseurs, the Jelly Roll Morton Library of Congress recordings have had a chequered history. A commercial edition was only released in the 1950s, with cuts and primitive sound. Subsequent versions were similarly truncated, at the cost of either music or speech and the loss of the spontaneous continuity between them, as Morton interweaves memories, pronouncements and performance. But at long last, the whole set has appeared in its glorious nine-hour entirety, on the Rounder Records label, presented in a handsome, piano-shaped box. It contains the sessions on seven CDs with an additional one devoted to Lomax's interviews with some of Morton's New Orleans contemporaries. Also included are a copy of Lomax's biography, “Mr Jelly Roll”, based on the Morton interviews, and a comprehensive essay by John Szwed, a jazz scholar, setting the whole project in context.

So fans of jazz, music in general, or just the incomparable richness of the human scene can relish Morton's musings complete, in state-of-the-art sound. Softly strumming the keys like a singer of tales, he recalls the “tough babies and sweet mamas” of the fabled red-light district of Storyville, and such denizens as Sheep Bite, Toodlum Parker and Chicken Dick. He conjures up a New Orleans funeral, from the wailing dirge to the graveyard to the raucous march back to the wake, with all its sorrow and jubilation—in his words, “the end of a perfect death”.

Every track offers marvels of piano virtuosity, in a whole spectrum of styles. Morton plays Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” in brilliant ragtime, then interprets it his own way, slower, but with much more swing. Throughout, he uses these sessions as a platform to demonstrate his views on jazz—not loud and blaring in the modern style, but subtle and melodious, with an irresistible beat and ample scope for dynamics and imagination.

Everything he plays embodies those qualities—a captivating exploration of “Tiger Rag”, going back to its ballroom origins as a quadrille, an utterly infectious tune called “Salty Dog” which consists of just four chords and a one-note melody, or a party piece like “Animule Ball”, an exuberant display of Morton the master entertainer, comprising jokes, freewheeling singing, and the scintillating keyboard touch which raised him above his rivals.

In the short time since it appeared, this magnificent boxed set has been flying off the shelves. With music and personality of such timeless appeal, this is no surprise. Of course, Morton would regard it as simple vindication of the supremacy he always claimed, and about time too. But it is also a monument to the vision, skill and commitment of Alan Lomax. His encounter with the New Orleans master was one of the key moments in a life devoted to bringing the riches of folk and vernacular music to as wide an audience as possible.

Pre-Morton, Lomax had concentrated on field work in the American South, gathering songs from local musicians. But the Library of Congress interviews with Morton suggested a whole new realm of possibility, not just focusing on musical materials but bringing to life the very cultures which they expressed and embodied. As Lomax put it, “I later came to call this process ‘the cultural feedback system', where people talk their images into a recording instrument or into a film, and suddenly begin to find that they have importance. All that came out of the Jelly Roll interview...This was the first oral history. Jelly Roll invented oral history, you might say.”

Over a long life—he died in 2002 at 87—Lomax pursued his belief in what he called “cultural equity” over a huge range of projects: the extensive Lomax collection on Rounder Records encompasses Italy and Ireland, American prisons, the Caribbean and much more. It all reflects Lomax's determination, in his words, “to put sound technology at the disposal of ‘The Folk', to bring channels of communication to all sorts of artists and areas”. While Jelly Roll Morton might jib at being merely classed as one of “The Folk”, he would certainly applaud Lomax's homage to the unique world in which he played such a magnificent part.